Cheesecake Stuffed Strawberries

Everyone needs a handful of recipes that make you seem a bit fancier than you are.

This is one of them.

I was lucky enough to join a group of sweet girls at a lovely vineyard last weekend. I knew I was going to take a snack, but I didn’t know what. I did some googling and some pinteresting but nothing really caught my eye. And then I remembered this little restaurant that served coffee with two of these little cheesecake stuffed strawberries. I had strawberries, and I had cream cheese so I ran with it.

These were so easy and made a beautiful presentation. And very quick! I did two pounds of strawberries in under thirty minutes. They aren’t overly sweet, while still indulgent. Basically, the perfect simple, yet elegant snack food.

First, you start by prepping your berries, I opted to slice off a teeny tiny portion of the bottom of the berry so they would sit flat, then lop off the top of the strawberry. Then you need to hollow it out. I tried doing this with a knife but found it was much easier, prettier, and faster to use a little measuring spoon.

I do think you have to be a little careful when your whittling away at your berries because if you get carried away you will have no strawberry left. So, whittle with caution. 🙂

Next, I threw an 8 ounce block of cream cheese in my stand mixer with some powdered sugar and vanilla extract and let it do it’s thing. Yep, just four simple ingredients in these little beauties!

I found the best method is to prep all your berries set them aside, make your filling then fill. So basically assembly line style. This would go even faster if you had someone else helping you.

Then I just scraped all of the filling into a piping bag and filled the strawberries as full as I could! If you don’t have or don’t want to pipe the filling in, no worries just spoon it, shove it, and throw it in there. It will all taste the same.

If you plan on taking these somewhere I recommend setting them in the freezer for 15-20 minutes before you go. It isn’t long enough to actually freeze them but it helps the cheesecake filling set so if they get knocked around while you are transporting them it doesn’t totally ruin them.

And there you have it, my favorite fancy girl appetizer that isn’t really fancy at all!